Pointed Copy

In the annals of completely ridiculous advertising, the original commercial on behalf of Ginsu knives has a special place. More than a quarter-century later, anyone old enough to remember it and many people who aren’t old enough to remember it will know the highlights — the guy karate-chopping a tomato, the knife sawing neatly through a tin can and the kind of hard-sell language we tend to associate with the most blatant forms of hucksterism. It’s a knife that will last forever. It’s a product no kitchen should be without. It’s the most incredible knife offer ever. And after the superlatives, the inevitable: But wait, there’s more.

The advertising copywriter Arthur Schiff, who died this year at age 66, has been credited as the coiner of that particular phrase, and as the contributor of a number of other more-or-less immortal entries in the lexicon of “direct response” marketing. These include “Isn’t that amazing?” and “Now how much would you pay?” According to Advertising Age, Schiff wrote scripts for some 1,800 spots of the sort that prodded the viewer to act now and buy the product by calling a phone number.

These all seem like somewhat quaint and maybe faintly embarrassing artifacts of a bygone age of unsophisticated, passive consumers, who lacked the many filters of digital cable, TiVo and YouTube. In the 1970s and early 1980s, Schiff worked for the direct-response agency of Ed Valenti and Barry Becher, which first unsheathed the Ginsu (a made-up name that didn’t mean anything; the knives were made in Ohio) for the American viewing public in 1978. Valenti concedes that consumers have changed since then. But the Ginsu spots that he and Schiff collaborated on resonated and became part of pop culture precisely because they were absurd, recognized as camp at the time and parodied immediately (and for years after they first appeared). The opening line — “In Japan, the hand can be used like a knife . . . but this method doesn’t work with a tomato” — was an example of what Valenti calls “grease copy,” meant to grab viewers and slide them into the spot. “It was a startling interruption,” he says. “People took notice.” And an awful lot of them bought knives.

Photo

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Illustrations by Leif Parsons

Getting people to take notice remains the central mission of marketing today. Schiff, who started his own direct-response shop in 1983, “had a gift,” Valenti says, for crafting such language. And while advertising has changed in some ways, “those phrases still work,” he says. “And the evidence that I would put forward is that they’re still being used.”

It turns out that the Ginsu itself never went away. The company that makes it, now known as Douglas Quikut, was acquired by Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway in 1985. For some years, Ginsu sales were “stagnant,” according to Michael Stuckey, general manager for Douglas Quikut. But in 2005, the company produced a new Ginsu infomercial, which, though comparatively staid, did show a key being Ginsued in half — and included an understated use of the phrase “But wait, there’s more.” (You can find the original spot, needless to say, on YouTube.) Meanwhile, Valenti and Becher published a chatty advice book called “The Wisdom of Ginsu” and have lately become knife vendors again through a site called Ginsu Guys.

Sales improved and were even better this year (up 33 percent). Ginsu knives now sell through Amazon and even Sears. This year they were sold for the first time in Korea, and next year they’ll be sold in Mexico, through Sam’s Club locations. In the U.S., Stuckey points out, a recent consumer survey by the trade magazine HomeWorld Business put Ginsu third in a ranking of knife-brand preference.

And variations on the buy-it-now hard sell are more numerous than ever in our sophisticated media age. Mainstream companies produce infomercials, and there are 24-hour networks devoted to peddling incredible products that no home should be without, and making a bundle doing it. (Last year, in fact, Valenti himself made an appearance on QVC . . . selling Ginsu knives. He moved several thousand in a matter of minutes.) So while the hilariously hokey Ginsu ads of the 1970s are in some ways a relic of a vanished era in media history, maybe they were also something else: a hint of the great multiplicity of hard sells to come. It’s always possible that the urgent-pitch style has finally peaked. But just wait; I have a feeling there will be more.